News and Events
August 2011. Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Jason Castro recently received a National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. This fund will support Dr. Castro, a member of Karl Kandler’s laboratory, to investigate novel cellular mechanisms that regulate the strength of neuronal connection in the auditory system.
Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tamara Perez-Rosello received a National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Dr. Rosello is a member of the laboratory of Thanos Tzounopoulos and this award will support her investigations towards understanding the role of synaptic zinc in the auditory brainstem.
Karl Kandler and Bill Yates were awarded an Institutional Training Grant (T32) from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. This five-year award provides funds to support training of students and postdoctoral fellows in the auditory and vestibular neuroscience.
In a recent article in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Dr. Tzounopoulos and associates provide novel evidence about the cellular mechanisms that underlie hyperactivity in auditory brainstem circuits in mice with behavioral evidence of tinnitus. This study makes use of novel imaging and behavioral techniques to demontrate that a decrease in GABAergic inhibition undrelies pathological hyperxcitability that is observed in the auditory braisntem of mice with behavioral evidence of tinnitus. Besides its implications towards understanding the biology of tinnitus, this study may eventually pave the way towards developing novel drug-based treatments of tinnitus in humans (Middleton J, Kiritani T, Pedersen C, Turner J, Shepherd G and Tzounopoulos T. PNAS, 2011, In Press)
In a recent article in the Journal of Neuroscience, Zhao and Tzounopoulos determined that physiological activation of cholinergic inputs controls associative synaptic plasticity in the dorsal cochler nucleus. This modulation occurs via activation of endocannabinoid signaling. This study reveals the importance of cholinergic modulation on the plasticity mechanisms found in the auditory brainstem (Zhao Y, Tzounopoulos T, Physiological Activation of Cholinergic Inputs Controls Associative Synaptic Plasticity via Modulation of Endocannabinoid Signaling. Journal of Neuroscience, 2011, 2011 Mar 2;31(9):3158-68)
In a recent article in the journal Neuroscience, Ricardo Gómez-Nieto and María Rubio provide a detailed description of the fine structure and adjacent neuropil of the main projection neurons (bushy cells) in the anteroventral cochlear nucleus of the rhesus monkey. These data provide evidence of a similar synaptic organization for the bushy cells in primate and other mammals (Gómez-Nieto R, Rubio M.E, Ultrastructure, synaptic organization, and molecular components of bushy cell networks in the anteroventral cochlear nucleus of the rhesus monkey. Neuroscience, In Press).
In a recent article in the journal Neuroscience, Kim and Kandler characterized the synaptic mechanism by which inhibitory connections in an inhibitory sound localization pathway become strengthened during development (Kim G, Kandler K, Synaptic changes underlying the strengthening of GABA/glycinergic connections in the developing lateral superior olive. Neuroscience 171:924-33)